Make your money work for you!

estateguru

In the recent year, there have been quite a few new P2P sites launching in the Baltics, the majority of them from Latvia and Lithuania, and many of them following the buyback model and Mintos and Twino made popular. However, as it seems investors have quite a bit of money at hand, and getting into loans may not always be super easy, then having the chance to diversify is definitely nice. So, if you’re looking for some new platforms to look into, here are a few that have popped up in recent times.

SWAPER is the P2P side for Wandoo Finance Finance group, which gives out short term loans in Georgia and Poland, making them a balance sheet lender. The group itself seems to be made up of people who have worked in various other financial sector companies, but have found that P2P buyback is a viable model. Their home page is admittedly very light on information, still.

VIAINVEST is a part of VIA SMS group – financial services provider operating across Europe since 2008 and the company currently operates in 5 countries and has grown into one of the leading European short-term lenders. They are a balance sheet lender (listing the loans they themselves have originated). Current total loans the group has originated – 288million euros.

The Lithuanian P2P portal lists pre-originated loans, making them a close match for Mintos‘ business model. They currently list three partners, but the amount of loans originated remains rather small – I think an issue might be with the regulations of the Lithuanian P2P market, which is very strict?

It’s interesting to see real estate portals, but they are of course far more difficult to kick off than loan-based sites. Bulkestate seems to be struggling with attracting people/projects, but it could potentially be a Latvian equivalent to CrowdEstate or Estateguru (but they better move quick before the Estonians manage more projects in Riga!)

Overall, it’s nice to see new platforms pop up, but they definitely have it much harder than the ones that came first – they have to prove that they have the knowledge, the volumes and the reliability that investors crave. However, due to higher risk levels, some of these also offer higher return rates, so it’s up to each investor to make up their own mind. I haven’t had a chance to test any of these sites out other than a cursory glance, but I hope that at least some of them do well and help increase P2P volumes in the Baltics.

If there is one topic that investors get passionate about, then it’s returns. Looking at the current economic climate, then P2P returns are clearly quite good, but the somewhat downwards trend you can see happening is clearly causing dismay among investors.

Way back when, when I started investing in Bondora, it was completely possible to get 20% returns yearly due to the fact that the market was both new (therefor high risk), and pricing was vague at best (due to lack of precise credit models). However, in the recent few years the industry has clearly evolved to be more mature and less inefficient, bringing to investors loans with buy-back guarantees, which at times might have left beginners the impression that there isn’t much inherent risk left anymore when it comes to investing into P2P (which is clearly not the case).

The two favourites of the recent year or so have clearly been the two Latvian portals – Mintos and Twino, which offered large loan volumes with buy-back guarantees. For a while the interest rates were high enough that many people were a bit confused as to why the rates were that high, and were sure that the rates would be dropping in the near future.

It seems that we are somewhat starting to reach the point where returns will not be as high as they were anymore, and this is of course both good and bad – for investors who enjoy higher risks, the reduced returns are of course bothersome, for more conservative investors the lowered level of risk will of course be more appealing.

Twino

Twino has already gone through one attempt to reduce the interest rates, which caused significant uproar among investors. They attempted to drop the interest rates to 10%, which caused investors to reduce their investments, which made them increase the rates once more, but they are still not back to the point where they started at (they used to be 12,9% & 14,9%; however now are 10-12% & 13% respectively.)

This means that while it’s still possible to generate >10% returns, then looking at the loan volumes they process the question arises – for how long? Since Twino is closing in on 10 million loans funded per month, then clearly there is enough investor money to go around, meaning when the higher interest loans run out, then the lower interest loans will get funded as well. Once enough get funded regularly, it would be reasonable to expect a drop in the rates.

Interestingly enough, a lot of investors in Twino seems to be super cautious about the longer term loans (24 months), which in my opinion seems a bit unfounded – largely because 1) they are resellable 2) a large amount of them get bought back early, meaning it’s not such a big commitment.

Now, with Mintos, the dynamic for the rates is a bit more complicated since different loan originators balance the interest rates between what they themselves believe to be fair and what the other originators are offering. This so far has caused a sort of a hierarchy to form between the different originators, meaning some loans disappear from the market very quickly (or get marked full by autobidders) while some remain “waiting” on the primary market.

While there have been fluctuations here and there between the interest rates offered, then it’s clear to see that the amount of loans with a buyback guarantee has been slowly but surely decreasing, meaning that investors are forced to do some more in depth analysis to figure out whether or not they should include lower rate buy-back loans or higher rate ordinary loans, which is rather complicated to do due to the lack of public information about the loan books of the originators.

Future of returns

Twino and Mintos do not exist in a vacuum – the amount of investor money available is dependent on the amount of projects listed on alternative sites and the returns offered there. However, if you look at the average returns offered by other portals, then >12% returns will be more and more unlikely as time goes on.

Just looking at the Estonian portals available, then Estateguru historical returns are <11%, for Bondora they have said they wish to hit 10% returns, for Investly the returns are <9%. Higher returns are offered by P2P portals which include more risk or a more complex model (Crowdestate for example inherently has much more risk, Omaraha’s premium for returns makes sense if you consider the fact that they have no proper exit mechanism available and the learning curve is rather steep).

It’s of course difficult to make predictions about the future, and how the markets behave, but I do believe that we are likely to be hitting the downwards slope of returns, which will in the long run bring us closer together to US/UK/Central European returns for P2P portals.

On the one hand this means a bigger faith by investors (investing their money at a lower rate), and a reduced risk rate (due to growth of the whole sector), on the other hand this will signify lower returns, and higher efficiency on the markets, meaning the >20% returns several investors have achieved are likely to be in the past. As someone who does believe that the effort/risk vs returns have been off balance so far, the returns lowering a bit is not an unexpected development.

Honestly, so many things were happening in P2P in Estonia in March that it was difficult to keep track of everything. Overall, big numbers, some chaos and interesting future perspectives would probably describe the month. Overall, I just got back from London and it was an experience in how far behind we are when it comes to investing being mainstream – you can hardly look anywhere in central London (or on the metro) and not see some sort of advertising for investing. Things are hopefully changing here as well, though.

Bondora personal portfolio

I’ve started the process of wrapping up my private portfolio, which can be seen from the dip in interest earned (below 100€ for the first time in 6 months). What this means is that I am selling off defaults and old mispriced loans, that I want to get rid of. Current plan is to sell off the not-so-great parts of my portfolio within this year, and then do a sale for the better loans next January (so the tax obligation would arrive mid-2018).

Overall I think it’s a reasonable plan because 1) secondary market is so slow at the moment that I don’t want to dedicate too much of my time to selling things 2) selling good EST loans at a premium won’t be an issue, so I might as well let them pay as they are, and then sell the ones that are too far from deadline once I actively pull out. I’ve transferred out 1K of money, which is going into stocks since it’s money invested as a private person.

Bondora business portfolio

For my business portfolio, I am a bit torn. Bondora is not the highest returning part of my P2P portfolio (Omaraha is), however Omaraha is unable to offer enough volume and lacks a secondary market. So it seems that Bondora will have to remain the biggest part of my portfolio at this point. There was a slight dip in interest returns since last month a lot of the loans started with frontloaded interest payments, it should stabilize out and start climbing now.

Omaraha portfolio

As time goes on, I have to admit, I am liking Omaraha more and more. It is clearly currently top when it comes to returns, since I haven’t had any defaults yet. However, they recently announced that all new defaults will have a buyback at 80% of principal value, which means that the potential loss isn’t immense – especially since most of my loans (90%) are 900+ (the highest) credit group. Looking rather stable, and aiming to get to 100/month in interest earned by some time in autumn. Will see, depending on how I manage the different proportions – adding money to Omaraha is heavily dependent on their volume of loans. I mostly just add money when what I have on the account has run out.

Mintos, Twino, Viventor

I’ve essentially given up with my idea that Mintos could offer reasonable short-length loans and slightly replayed the proportions between Twino and Mintos. Of course, Twino has been slightly confusing this month, the biggest problem being that the autobidder is slightly broken at the moment. Viventor finally managed to get theirs working though, so there must be balance in the universe 😉

Currently Twino/Mintos stand equal in my portfolio (just added the money into Mintos later, which is why the interest returns lag). For Viventor, they seem to be doing OK, so I will probably add in a couple of hundred extra there just for their 1-month length loans. Mintos’s offers of 13% consumer loans and 13,5% car loans means that even though I’m not a fan of the loan lengths there, it does slightly pull ahead in the race of the Latvian platforms at the moment.

Crowdestate

I have this dream, that one day CrowdEstate’s IT system will work as intended. At this point it seems like they are still suffering from issues when a new project releases, which made this project fun – since I was in London I had to find a Starbucks for wifi and then suffer through the horror of using their website on my mobile phone. I really want them to do well, but issues like this take away a lot of goodwill that investors would otherwise have.

Estateguru, Moneyzen & Investly

Estateguru is impressing with volumes, however as stated before, not adding any money currently since my portfolio there is private (no word of a secondary market for a long time now).

Moneyzen did not manage to get the new regulatory license on time, which means that no new loans are being given out. Which makes me reasonably happy that I ‘only’ have 500€ there, but it’s not being reinvested, so not good overall.

Investly seems to have gotten their pipeline for factoring (invoice selling) going, there seems to be a reasonable amount of invoices listed, which is making me consider actually finalizing my registration and testing them out.

February passed so quickly that I didn’t really even have time to do much. However, despite the shortness, it was a nice growth month, with several interesting things happening on many P2P portals.

Bondora personal portfolio

Interestingly enough Bondora was by far the biggest surprise this month – after such a long time of investors complaining about all the things, they seem to have taken the investors’ wishlist and just started crossing off all the things that have piled up in the past few years. New cash flow & dashboard components allow for some interesting modelling options for your portfolio’s future. I haven’t had too much time to play around with it, but I must admit I like what I’m seeing!

Interest returns are now slowly starting to drop (to 108€) due to the fact that I’m slowly starting my exit. I’ve transferred out my first 450€ (which is being sent to work on the stock market). I’ve also started to slowly sell parts of my portfolio that will be selling at a loss – I don’t have to take into account any taxation issues on those, and at this moment selling large amounts of loans on the secondary market is definitely not comfortable. However, I’ve started to scan through my loans and started selling off defaulted loans that haven’t really started to recover and loans that are suffer from pricing issues (old HR loans with 20%-ish interest rates). It takes some playing around with discount rates, but I’m happy with how it’s going so far. The loans I’ll sell with a premium I’ll start selling Jan 2017 – meaning the tax obligation hits summer 2018.

Bondora business portfolio

The business portfolio is growing as planned. I’ll hit 200 loan pieces soon and then I’ll likely increase the bid size a bit. Overall absolutely no issues with money going out (I’m not using too strict criteria – just country & credit group limited). I must say I am pleased with the pricing changes since it’s clear to see when comparing my two portfolios that loans that are priced with the rating follow expectations reasonably well – AA, A, B loans are showing very good payment discipline, I hope the likelihood of defaults is also correctly determined, as my portfolio grows I’m becoming more of a fan of slow and steady.

Omaraha portfolio

Omaraha is doing slow and steady, most important news is that there was an announcement that they’ve received the permit needed to keep functioning from the Estonian Financial Authority. Still, Omaraha has some downsides – at this point I haven’t had any loans go out for 8 days (usually the rate is about 1 loan/day). I’m wondering if it’ll start moving or I’ll have to play around with the interest rates. I like their no-hassle system but lack of a secondary market is making me balance investments between different portals, and not letting Omaraha move too far ahead.

Mintos, Twino, Viventor

Interestingly enough the Latvian buyback triplets caused most hassle for me this month. Mintos could still use some usability upgrades, and it’s become clear that short-term investing there isn’t viable due to a lack of short term loans. However, my hopes for Twino becoming a major player in my portfolio were dashed with their brutal interest cut and some recent communication blunders. I did start investing in Viventor as well, but that’s mostly play-money at this point as they build up their reliability.

Definitely interesting choices to be made here in the near future – if the Latvians had managed to keep going as well as they were for the next few months, I think they would have wormed their ways into investors’ hearts even more, but as it stands, making decisions to divide my P2P portfolio is becoming difficult with all sites having some downsides.

Crowdestate portfolio

I contributed a small amount in the most recent CE project. A new one is opening for this months, I’m interested to see what it is. As it stands, the first round of investments that I’ve contributed in are starting to finish up, so I hope that the reinvestment snowball will start rolling at some point.

Estateguru & Moneyzen portfolios

Did not add any new money to either. Would probably exit if possible (at the very least to switch to business portfolios), but both stil lack a secondary market. At least my investments in MZ are small enough to get reinvested rather regularly. With Estateguru I’m just stacking up money to probably transfer it out at some point.

This month has been fun in social lending. I’ve been discovering new portals, rearranging investments to switch things to my business account and overall making plans for this year.

Bondora personal portfolio

I’m starting to take money out of my personal portfolio as of this month. Currently I’ve set it to invest into Estonian AA & A loans, seems like getting about 10 of those a month is a solid enough strategy. I’m hoping to take out all the money invested within the next two years and then make a full exit within the third. Despite that, January was a record month since the lack of reinvesting isn’t felt yet.

Total interest earned climbed a bit over 110€, next month should probably be a bit smaller in terms of the total amount yet. This month brought about many changes at Bondora, a lot of the new reports I like, the lack of meaningful recovery data is still a bit annoying, but overall I like the new cash flow, especially the predictive part of it.

Bondora business portfolio

There isn’t much to report here yet. I’ve invested into about 150 loans, and most of them start repaying in February. January interest income was ~10€, but the interest income for February should already be in the range of 50€. Current strategy is Estonian loans, up to C class (a bit of D as well), currently investing 20€ per piece mostly, seems like getting 100+ EST loans with non-strict criteria is rather easily doable.

Omaraha portfolio

Now, Omaraha is rather interesting. The guesswork included in trying to figure out which interest rates to use is definitely an intriguing thought exercise. Seems like I’ve managed to reach a sort of a sweet spot where I have, on average, one loan go out per month. No loans have reached delinquency yet, but time will tell how that starts impacting my portfolio. The defaulted loans get sold off to a buyback fund, so you can assess your returns in a more immediate manner than you can do in Bondora.

I started with the portfolio in November already, the interest payments are however just now ramping up, February totals should be somewhere in the range if 45€ already. Overall, not much to follow here and you don’t really have access to any meaningful data to analyse. Lack of secondary market is still problematic, so this can’t ever be the biggest part of my portfolio, even if the returns at this point seem rather good.

Mintos & Twino

The two Latvian sites are also in experimental stages at this point. Since I wanted to add money into short term loans, then so far Twino has been winning out on that – super easy and sleek user interface, no cash drag to speak of, and a wide array of loans to invest into. For Mintos, it seems that short term loans (or invoices) are in short supply if you want to actually diversify reasonally. Due to this I’ve added less money into Mintos so far, and I’ve had to pick out more long term loans to actually employ all the money. Both sites have secondary markets though, so exit is possible. So far looks like Twino will be winning out for me personally in this duel.

Estateguru & Moneyzen

I did not add in any money to Estateguru or Moneyzen. If possible, I would exit Estateguru as a private person and switch to a company portfolio. For Moneyzen a lack of a secondary market and lack of volumes makes me not want to add more funds either. Currently I’m just seeing how their recovery processes work.

Crowdestate

Not much happening on this front either. Waiting for some projects to end (the first one I was involved in, was finished in December). There will be a new project open on Monday so I’ll look into that and decide whether to contribute as well. Still hoping they manage to actually hit the pace of 1 project/month.